


Bleak Midwinter

by frith_in_thorns



Category: White Collar
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood Loss, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Flashbacks, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Hypothermia, Post-Finale, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-30
Updated: 2014-12-30
Packaged: 2018-03-04 10:06:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3063875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frith_in_thorns/pseuds/frith_in_thorns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Finale spoilers) New Year in Paris is very far from how Neal had imagined it. It nearly ends up being his last.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bleak Midwinter

**Author's Note:**

> Content notes: depiction of depression and attempted suicide.
> 
> This fic came out of a long discussion with sholio about Neal's state of mind during season 5 and 6, and how it fit with my longstanding headcanon of him periodically struggling with depression. (Actually I felt pretty mean writing this. Sorry, Neal!)

The snow was stinging his eyes as Neal's trudging footsteps brought him to the edge of one of the Parisian parks. He hadn't been aiming for anywhere in particular, but he didn't feel more than a dull acceptance that this was where he had ended up. He liked walking in the parks, usually.

They were all empty now, or close to. It was well after sunset, and a bitter wind hurled tiny flakes of snow like shrapnel. Everyone with sense was at home, and grateful to be there.

Neal felt he could do without sense. Besides, he'd had enough whisky to chase even the dregs of it away before he had been overcome by the desperate urge to get _out_. The dim grey glow of the snow-filled city, as close to dark as it was going to get, fitted his mood. 

His shoulders hunched up against the knifing wind as he turned along one of the paths. Like a New York winter, almost… Except not really. Nothing was like New York, not really, not in the ways that mattered.

The snow on the ground was becoming thick enough to obscure the path. On impulse, Neal headed for a stand of trees instead. He wanted to be alone. Completely alone. Somewhere no one else could even reach. He stumbled slightly over tree roots, or maybe that was still the alcohol. The freezing air made him feel more sober than he had in his apartment, but he knew he was still drunk. 

There was solitude under the trees. Even the wind died away, as it was snagged and torn to ribbons by the wildly waving branches above. When he came to a small opening — it wasn't large enough to be called a clearing or a glade — he finally came to a stop. The break in the canopy had allowed the snow in, and it had drifted and settled there. It seemed a good place for him, too, to halt, as if he also had been pushed along by the wind and he didn't know where to go now that it was absent.

It was late evening on New Year's Day. Neal had gone to one of the public firework displays the night before, but his heart hadn't been in it. He didn't want a new start. He wanted an _old_ start, with everything back the way it was before he had torn it all apart for reasons it was sometimes hard to remember. _You're protecting them,_ he reminded himself again and again, but selfishly it became harder and harder to care. He just wanted to go _home_. Last night he had managed to fight against his maudlin mood, going sensibly to bed instead of finding a party like everyone else seemed to be doing, and he had congratulated himself for making such a sensible decision. But then he had woken up on January 1st to a world celebrating a new start, and his willpower had broken. He had been drinking steadily all day, without even the excuse that everyone else was doing the same which he would have had the evening before.

A wave of disgust washed over him. He _had_ an entire new start, a whole new life, and he was doing nothing with it. Some small burglaries which had utterly failed to produce the thrill they once would have, and instead left a sick feeling of guilt in his stomach. _Imagine what Peter would say…_ He kicked the snow bitterly. 

He ought to start making his way back. He couldn't stay standing in the snow in the middle of nowhere. Even if technically where he was was in the middle of a city, there was no one around. He was off the path; no one would find him.

That was a darkly attractive thought. Neal let it stay, deliberately turning away from examining it too closely. He had been doing that a lot lately. Thoughts kept creeping up, ones about how _easy_ it had been to disappear completely, and how he was still all but invisible even in this supposed new life, and about how little he cared about anything any more. He didn't know whether he liked these thoughts, but it seemed too much work to turn them away. And now another crept up, suggesting that he might as well sit down…

He kicked snow away from the base of a bare tree and sat on the damp ground, leaning against the trunk. It was cold, but he was already cold. 

He unbuttoned his coat, and shrugged out of it. _Just testing a theory, that's all._ He pulled his sweater off over his head. The cold wind played along his bare arms, but his skin was already white and going numb. It didn't make him colder as such; it was just a different sensation. Numbness. It was good. 

_I'll get up soon,_ he thought. But really, inertia seemed so much more appealing right then. He was hidden and no one would find him. There was no reason he _should_ get up, really. He could just stay there, growing more and more numb, until there was nothing at all. No need to run. No need to fulfil any expectations. No one to miss. Everything would just be… gone.

By feel rather than sight one clumsy hand found the tool kit in an inner pocket of his coat. _Everything gone._ No more grieving, no more unending bleakness. He traced one finger down his forearm, marking the vein beneath the colourless skin. Then he took the scalpel from his tool kit and followed the same track.

There was no blood immediately. The line he had scored was pale, gaping like a canyon cutting down through banded layers of rock. It didn't even hurt.

It took long seconds before the expected blood came, welling up and out. Neal watched dispassionately as it spread across his skin, running in rivulets which branched and converged, and slid from the curve of his arm down to the snow. In the dim light it looked black.

Still numb, he closed his eyes.

~

One day when he was seven, Neal — Danny — was allowed to sleep over at Jacob's in the middle of the week after school, which was a thing that never ever happened. He hadn't even had to suggest it — his mother had told him as she was dropping him off that he was going to Jacob's that night. Which was _awesome_ , and he and Jacob were relentless all day in telling anyone who would listen about it.

Jacob's mom was nice, although she smelled incredibly strongly of soap, and her house was full of pictures of dogs. She told Danny that she hoped his mom would feel better soon, which made him smile and nod in confusion because he didn't know what she was talking about but he hated for adults to know when that happened and he had learned to hide it.

He and Jacob stayed up until nearly eleven and ate a whole packet of twinkies under the blankets and neither of them brushed their teeth afterwards. Jacob had been given a joke book for his birthday and they practised them on each other, giggling so loudly that they had to stuff their pyjama sleeves in their mouths for fear of being heard. 

It was a _great_ sleepover, and both of them were satisfactorily tired at school the next day. Danny was looking forward to telling Mom all about the fun he'd had, and trying out his new jokes on her, but when he came out of the school gates at three o'clock, Ellen was there instead.

He loved Ellen, and he knew she loved him, but today her usual smile was missing. "Where's Mom?" he asked.

"She's not very well," Ellen said, but her voice was odd. It was the sort of voice that grownups used when they didn't want to talk about something and thought it was Inappropriate For Children. "You're going to come home with me instead tonight — that'll be fun, won't it?"

"But what about Mom?" Danny asked. When he was sick Mom made him a special bed on the couch and heated up juice for him to drink and sometimes read him stories if she had time. "Won't she be all on her own?"

"Mom's not at home either tonight," Ellen said. "She's at the hospital, where there are nice people looking after her."

Danny began to be scared. People went to the hospital when they were _really_ sick, or when they fell off a scaffold, or…

Ellen's face changed again, like she knew she'd said the wrong thing. "Danny, your mom's going to be just fine," she said, in the calm sort of voice that people who were in charge, like teachers, used. "People do go to the hospital when they're only a little bit ill, I promise. You'll be able to see her really soon."

Danny still hadn't moved. "What's wrong with her?" he asked, stubbornly.

Ellen's voice went all odd again. "It's an adult sort of illness. But she'll be just fine in a day or two, and then she'll be back home."

He hadn't known there were special adult kinds of illnesses, but it made sense that there would be. After all, adults never seemed to get chickenpox or be sick from eating too much candy. He was perfectly happy after that to go home with Ellen, and he found when they got to her little house that she had already collected some of his clothes, and a couple of books, and the blue stuffed cat that was called Parsley. "Can I make Mom a get-well-soon card?" he asked, and Ellen agreed that yes, that sounded like a nice idea.

She said some odd things to him during the evening. Like, "Danny, your Mom loves you a whole lot," and "I'm always going to be here if you want to talk to me." And when he had finished his card she looked at it for a moment like she was angry, but then that expression went away so fast he thought he must have imagined it. Ellen wouldn't be angry with Mom for being sick.

Mom was in the hospital for several days. Danny missed her, and would have liked to visit her, but wasn't allowed. She was in a bit of it that wasn't for children. Ellen left him with other friends of his mom when _she_ got to visit, and they had whispered conversations in hallways which he knew he wasn't supposed to hear. He tried to listen in anyway, but didn't understand the bits he made out.

"I know it's a sin, but I'm just sorry —"

"Such a sweet little boy she has; I can't _believe_ —"

"You didn't have to clean it up all by yourself, Ellen?"

At long last, Ellen told him that Mom was home and he could go back there too. Danny was nearly bursting with excitement by the time they arrived. He pounded up the steps to the stoop and banged the door open in the way he was constantly being told off for, but this time Mom didn't seem to mind a bit. She was waiting for him, and when he had finished hugging her he realised to his horror that she was crying.

"Mom?" he asked, uncertainly.

Mom wiped the tears hastily away. "I'm sorry, Danny," she said. "I'm just so glad to be home with you. I'm _so_ sorry…"

"Why're you sorry?" he asked, confused.

"Mom's sad she was away from you," Ellen said, from behind him. 

"Yes," Mom agreed. "Danny, I'm sorry for not being here."

"But you were sick," Danny said. "That's not your fault."

"There," Ellen said, and Danny didn't know what she meant by that at all. But Mom was back and she was better now and everything was back to normal again.

It was a long, long time before Neal properly thought about those days; before he brought out all his memories and examined them and pieced them together with all the context he had been missing. No great revelation, just a quiet but aching _Oh_ of recognition.

It was even a blessing, maybe, that it hadn't come sooner. They would never have been able to talk about it.

~

The cold pulled him back. Deep shivers, wrenching him out of sleep and wracking him to his core.

The snow and the trees were just black and white lines at first; abstract scribbles of charcoal across cheap paper. He felt tangled and trapped by them before he realised what they were. 

He was awake because his body was fighting his intention. He had wanted numbness; wanted to abdicate from everything, including himself, but his body was sending him sharp stabs of pain from deep inside — a reminder that he couldn't, after all, sever all connections as easily as that. Not so quietly and smoothly.

The blood coating his forearm was clotting. It stretched stickily as he moved the limb cautiously. No pain there. Not yet.

He still had to decide, he realised. _Decide_ what choice to make, even though he had stumbled out here to avoid exactly that. Freezing seemed like it should be easy, passive, but now there was this unwanted lucidity. _It's up to you,_ sounded a voice in his head, and horribly it sounded like Peter. Horrible because it conjured his image, of course, and then Elizabeth, and Mozzie, and June. All of whom thought he was dead — and therefore, why _shouldn't_ he be?

It was fatal, allowing an argument to form. He was fogged and sick with cold, his body clamouring for better treatment. Ghosts in his head watching him. _Neal, what are you doing?_

His clothes were soaked with snow. It was almost too much effort to pick up his coat, but the part of him that sounded like Peter reminded him that he needed what was in the pockets. Keys, wallet, phone. Wrestling it over the arm he had sliced open was difficult, but he managed. The sweater he abandoned, barely caring.

Black and white became crazed tangles again as he fought himself to his feet, the world swirling around him. He staggered sideways, catching himself by luck against a tree, and moaned aloud from the dizziness. A dark splotch on the white ground showed where he had been sitting, where he had bled.

He already felt like lying down again. _It'll work this time,_ a different part of his mind whispered. No inconvenient waking. But he pushed his way through the low, clawing branches without trying to formulate a response. 

The path, when he found it, held faint footprints. He followed them, wondering if there was someone else out here after all. It was a long time before he realised they were his own, made on the way in.

He was shaking and sweating when he reached the streets, lightheaded from more than the cold. Here the snow was already being churned to grey slush by wheels and boots. Even tonight there was traffic; tourists, people visiting families or heading to belated, more sedate celebrations of the New Year. He could call a taxi easily to get him back to his apartment. ( _Or to the hospital,_ Peter-in-his-head suggested, but Neal ignored that.)

Instead, he walked. Car headlights drew wavering beams of light on walls and windows, flickering past as the wheels sent up waves of slush from the piles accumulating along the kerbs. Monet might have painted these streets with grey and yellow and black flicks of his brush. And deciphering the street names and tracking the flow of the pavements required Neal to focus his eyes differently, the way one did to watch a Monet spring from tiny blurring brush strokes into its sudden unexpected clarity, almost dizzyingly.

There was snow on the steps of his building, when it should have been salted away. It clung to his shoes as he tried to force the key into the lock with fingers that were just as stiff as the metal. 

Unlike June's house, this building had an elevator. He had never been more grateful for it, even if his reflection in the mirrored walls was an almost physical shock. His face had no colour, the same white-grey as the trodden slush outside. His hair was damp and in disarray, and twigs and pine needles clung to the black wool of his coat. 

When he finally reached the small apartment he was renting, he didn't know what to do. Making a decision seemed like too much of an effort. And his legs were threatening to give way — which would at least solve the problem for him.

 _If you wanted to collapse and be done with it all then you should have stayed in the snow,_ another voice from inside him chided. This time it sounded like Mozzie. _Since you decided against that you have to deal with the consequences._

He was bleeding, wasn't he? Neal stumbled into the small kitchen, separated from the rest of the living area by a built-in breakfast bar. He looked at his arms blankly for a moment before pulling off his coat. A small piece of forward-thinking made him drape it over the breakfast bar rather than letting it drop on the floor for him to trip over.

His left arm was covered in blood, crusted and flaking for the most part, but still red and sticky over the long gash itself. It was somehow surprising, and he felt faint and dizzy again at the sight of it. 

_Clean it. Then find something to seal the wound. You know what to do._ He wasn't sure he could, though. Grey specks were flickering in his eyes, snow falling here too, and suddenly he was clutching the edge of the sink to try and stay upright. 

He failed. He didn't remember falling, but abruptly he was lying on the hard tiled floor. Waves of dull pain radiated out from his arm into the rest of him. "Hell," he whispered. 

_You can get up, Neal. Come on._ It was the same voice as before; June's voice, commanding and comforting at the same time. 

"I can't," he whispered.

_Of course you can._

He always listened to June. Weakly, he grasped above his head for a handhold, but instead what he tugged on came slithering down on top of him in wet, heavy folds. His coat. He moaned, fighting it away, as things fell out of its pockets with little thumps.

His cell phone had landed near his hand. Neal looked at it for a while. He wanted to call… There were _so many_ people he wanted to call. People he had grown used to being able to call when he needed them. If he had been in New York…

He struggled to sit up, and another wave of dizziness took him. He felt sick again, and afraid now too. Afraid that he _was_ going to die — and he suddenly, strongly, didn't want to. It had been that last, vivid memory of New York, and the people there whom he loved and who loved him back. _Neal, what are you doing?_

He had promised himself that he would resist all temptation to contact anyone from that life. He was keeping them _safe_ by staying completely absent. As he reached for the phone and clumsily turned it on he could feel hot tears building in his eyes. 

He dialled, and immediately closed his eyes to stop them spilling. No good; he could still feel them prickling against his eyelids as they forced their way out.

"Hello?"

"June," he croaked. "June, I… it's Neal."

There was complete stillness on the other end of the line. 

"Please, don't hang up," Neal begged. Tears were sliding down his cheeks now. "June, please."

"Neal," June repeated. Her low, mellow voice didn't give any of her emotions away. 

Neal kept his eyes shut. He couldn't bear to face what surrounded him. "It's all gone wrong. I'm sorry. So, so sorry."

"Neal!" June's voice had sharpened. "Are you in trouble? Hurt?"

"It was my fault," Neal admitted. His actions suddenly seemed unbearably stupid. How could he possibly explain to June what he had tried to do? "Oh god… I shouldn't have called you."

"Neal Caffrey, don't you _dare_ hang up the phone!" June ordered. 

"No, no," Neal agreed, hastily. It wasn't a tone to be disobeyed.

"Where are you? Are you safe?"

"Paris," Neal told her. He reeled off his address, too, obeying her question before his brain could catch up. "I'm… there's a lot of blood. I can't stand up."

"Neal. I'm about to call you an ambulance."

"No!" he insisted, panicked. 

"I'll need more convincing than that not to. Neal, tell me what happened." She was worried, he could tell that, and yet her voice was steady and calm.

He clung to it, and found it gave him enough strength to finally push himself up, again using the edge of the sink for support. "My arm's cut," he said, when he had caught his breath. "Outside. I'm inside now."

"Is it still bleeding?" June asked.

Neal stared at it. "Not really."

"Okay," she said. "Did you get up, just now?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, Neal, that's great. Can you clean your arm and put something over it?"

Neal fumbled the tap on, and stuck his forearm under it. He could barely feel the water at first, and then sensation abruptly returned and he gasped in pain. But he held his arm there as the dried blood dissolved, flaking off into the sink, and was washed away. Finally he turned off the flow of water. "June?"

"I'm still here," she said. "I'm not going anywhere."

"I don't have bandages," Neal told her. He could already feel willpower leaking away again.

"It sounds like you need stitches," she countered. "But if you won't go… do you have glue?"

It was stupid of him not to have thought of such a thing himself. He had a tube of superglue in a drawer of odds and ends; one-handed he managed to get the lid off. He patted the gash dry with a tea towel and then immediately filled it in with the glue, sealing it all along its length. It hurt, but not as much as he had expected. "There," he said.

"Good," June said. "You're doing good, Neal. Now, I need you to drink water. At least a litre. You have to replace the fluid you've lost."

He felt sick again at the thought of putting anything into his stomach, but he seemed to have already relinquished control to June's firm voice. Everything else seemed hazy and unreal in comparison. He found a large glass and filled it from the tap, draining it as quickly as he could before filling it again. His thirst surprised him. 

"Drink as much as you can," June ordered him. "Are you hurt anywhere else?"

"No," Neal said. "Just cold. From the snow."

"Your clothes are wet?"

"Yeah." He drank more water, moving on automatic.

"Get into dry, warm things," June said. "You need to be warm, you need to stay hydrated, and you need to sleep."

By the time Neal made it to his bed the room was fuzzy around him. He changed without really looking at anything other than the phone which he had had to temporarily put down. "June?" he murmured, as he burrowed beneath the covers.

"Here," she said. "I'm always here for you, Neal."

"I know," he whispered. "I've missed you."

Her breathing hitched sharply. "It's going to be okay," she said. "I promise."

He didn't want to sleep. He wanted to stay awake, to cling to this fragile connection. "Thank you," he whispered, but never heard her reply.

~

He dreamed that June was there in Paris with him. She stroked his hair, and made him half-sit to drink more water, and hummed old jazz songs under her breath. In his dreams he could feel the warmth of her, even smell her perfume.

When he woke, she was still there.

"June?" he whispered. She was sitting on one of his chairs, reading a book from his collection. But at his quiet voice she looked up immediately.

"Neal," she said, coming over. She was smiling as she took his hand, but there was worry creased around her eyes. 

"You're here," he said, wonderingly. "Were you in Paris all along?" Then, in sudden suspicion, "You _are_ here, aren't you? Not a dream."

"Oh, Neal," she said, and caressed his hair in the familiar way he remembered. "Yes, I'm really here. I was booking a flight while I was still on the phone to you. And a good thing, too."

Experimentally, Neal lifted his left arm. It was bandaged neatly.

"I lost count of the stitches," June said, reprovingly. "A doctor called round. Friend of a friend. He gave you something to let you get the sleep you needed, too."

Neal swung his legs over the side of the bed, pushing off the blankets. June didn't stop him, which he took as permission. He was shaky, but able to stand. "You flew to Paris."

June took his arm. Neal didn't think he needed the support, but didn't object. His breath seemed to catch in his throat. "Does anyone else —"

"— know that you're not dead? No." June's mouth tightened in remembered pain. "I trust you. You must have a good reason for this."

"I do," Neal assured her. "I'll tell you… But is everyone all right?"

June's mouth pursed again. "They're as you'd expect," she said. "Doing a little better than you were."

She had been steering him towards the dining table, where he could see that she had already laid out breakfast for him, but Neal came to a stop. "I'm sorry," he said, very quietly.

"Oh, my boy," June whispered. Her arms came up to enfold him, and Neal leaned into the infinitely comforting solidity of her. It was only then that he could feel her shaking. She had hidden it so well up til now. "Don't you do that to me again. Don't you _dare_."

"I'm sorry," Neal whispered again, into her shoulder. He didn't know what else to say.

June released him, and wiped her eyes. "We'll talk about it," she said. "We'll talk about what to do next. But the important thing is, you're alive."

"And you're here," Neal said. His own eyes were beginning to tear up again.

June nodded. "It's going to be okay."


End file.
